We record everything and remember nothing. Endless travel is a way of disguising inner emptiness. Artists increasingly put themselves at the centre of their work. These are some of the ideas that animate Stephen Poliakoff's new play, Remember This. But while many of them have one nodding in agreement, Poliakoff has problems creating a plot that plausibly sustains them.
Not for the first time, Poliakoff's hero is an inventor who misses the boat. In Breaking the Silence it was a Jewish patriarch trying to make talking pictures in the wake of the Russian revolution. Here it is a roguish English chancer, Rick, who has never managed to capitalise on his own inventions. He was the first with wedding videos and stretch-limos but, on the eve of his second marriage, he remains a likable also-ran. As his future sister-in-law, management-consultant Hannah, points out, it's far more profitable to steal someone else's notions than to invent your own.
But Rick makes a startling discovery: all his home videos from the early 80s are nothing more than a ripple of wavy lines. A virus, he learns, has erased everyone else's private memories. And, visiting a vast Swiss video museum at Hannah's instigation, he finds that many of the key images of modern history have literally dissolved: everything from the Kennedy-Nixon debates to the fall of the Berlin Wall vanishes from the screen leaving behind an empty white light.
The erosion of collective historical memory is a fascinating idea: one which Poliakoff also explored in an admired TV trilogy, Shooting The Past. But here the narrative structure fails to support it. Rick, helped by Hannah's market expertise, believes he will become rich and famous through his discovery. But how and why? Individuals hardly want to be told that their camcorder memories are a waste of space. And big institutions would, presumably, either have back-up tapes or the resources to go digital. Even the notion that Rick's son would clean up by turning his fragmented memories into installation art seems far-fetched.
But while Poliakoff's plot has more holes than a second-hand colander his social observations often have a deadly accuracy. You can't believe in the sudden success of Rick's son but when he says there's no more space for "quiet things" like a thesis on George Gissing he's dead right. The restlessly mobile Hannah also spots the deep-seated superstition of City technocrats. Even a throwaway remark by a medical consultant that "I am a complete and unapologetic reactionary in everything but my work" has extraordinary resonance: Poliakoff has spotted that professional radicalism often goes hand in hand with social conservatism.
The play is full of odd lines that gnaw away at you. And even if, like Rick, Poliakoff fails to capitalise on his own ingenious ideas, Ron Daniels's production, after a sticky start with a stag party, keeps the action flowing. Stanley Townsend also lends Rick a heavyweight charm, Geraldine Somerville catches the aura of sexiness and unhappiness that surrounds the peripatetic Hannah, while Annabelle Apsion is all observant shrewdness as her sister and Colin Hurley and James Duke turn a pair of Swiss archivists into an amusing Gilbert and George double-act. There are lots of incidental pleasures: one just wishes Poliakoff had found a plot to support his thesis that we are in grave danger of losing our collective memory.
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